Romancing the Stoned
by kittu9
Summary: When you're immortal, all powerful, and alcoholic, you take what you can get. A Saga of Yuuko and Clow, in vignettes.
1. She will compose this in her grave

_i. Yuuko_

She does not recall a time in which she did _not_ exist, or even a place (the situation with Loki and Singe was, she thinks with a curled lip, truly tasteless).

This is a tiresome and lonesome business, although she never says so, and at least that necessary organ of her heart cannot be really broken (though it will remain, forevermore, just a shade past repairing).

Yuuko starts drinking a few months into the seventh century and, after that, never quite finds the time in which to stop.

_  
ii. The naming of names_

She accumulates names the way that men collect slaves and twenty-first century women buy shoes: trying each successive one out for a while and discarding, or forgetting the reason for which it was acquired.

'Yuuko' works as well or better than most of the others (although she is secretly fond of the way an enraged poet once called her a 'saucy pedantic wretch'), at it is not an unfamiliar name for her current continent (she's lived here, in one dimension as well, for some time now)—but above all things, she never utters and rarely thinks of what happened to her true name.

_  
iii. If I am quiet, it will pass me by_

_What is it_, Clow asks her lazily. He is lying across her bed, where he has devoted the past several hours to his own bizarre school of metaphysical philosophy (and more than casual flirtations). Now he is kissing, with absent and courtly tenderness, the descending line of her jaw.

_Nothing much_, she answers, her words slightly muffled by a dreamy lungful of opium. –This is astonishingly true, though: in Clow's company (and when she is smoking her sweetly delirious opium pellets) she has fewer visions, does not feel compelled to catalogue numerous timelines by species of fruit.

She's still aware of his future, though, the potentiality of it looming like a clockwork that's bound to stop.


	2. Here comes the adventure

_iv. Fresh fish on Fridays, Monday in the mother-tongue_

After the first time, he never enters her garden by way of the front gate.

--She will in fact ignore his entrances, leastways until he enters her kitchen (he is a benign invader and she is merciless in her demands: a different cuisine every day of the week!). Once someone enters her kitchen, Yuuko has a tendency to regard them as her personal servant.

(They used to sit on the floor on a set of small braided rugs in colours that were outright _loud_ and they ate together, often with their hands. Yuuko nearly always dripped curry or oil or some of whatever was messiest onto his half of their notes: she hated his lovely penmanship and her own writing was nothing so much as an ill-mannered _scrawl_ because she wouldn't be bothered to slow down for just a moment and look up how to spell the word "phosphorescent.")

"Was Clow Reed a Catholic?" —A historian asks her this somewhere in the twenty-third century, when such questions are less inflammatory than they are curious. Yuuko laughs at the tweedy little man and answers, in a dialect of Latin that was spoken only in monasteries founded before the year 1200, that the fish is too dear at these market prices; one must make do with has been otherwise provided, and please God.

_  
v. The woman in me shouts out_

For a few years—it must have been the time just before, or just after, one of those terrible wars, a story unto itself—she found her shop inexhaustibly filled with young women, all of them wishing the same wrong wish.

(_Keep me barren for just a few more weeks--_)

(_Just let him marry me and everything will be all right--_)

(_Don't let my mother, my father, my grandmother, my brother find out--_)

Except one girl with bruised breasts, a cigarette-burned stomach and an abraded throat: she looked Yuuko in the eye (they never do that, you know, not properly) and said, "Make this never have happened." (She didn't dare specify, in case the more malicious ancestral ghosts loitering outside could hear her: but the foetus clung to the uterine wall regardless, striving to survive past this, the seventh week of gestation into the eighth, and a little longer, and a little longer, until a whole lifetime had gone by.)

Yuuko looked back and said, "This thing which you seek can never be returned to you." (But reparations can be made, so she led the girl into the back room and told her what could have been before she took the colour of her eyes on a bright morning and that tiny, fluttering second heartbeat from her.)

(And later, when everything had been taken care of—the bitter tisane swallowed, the ferocious cramping come and gone, what felt like weeks of slow bleeding tapering into nothing—the girl ran away believing that she was one of the lucky ones.)

Yuuko keeps obscure glass jars in one of the storerooms, where she shelves the sad payments for this kind of wish. She says it is a fair price—and it is a fair price, as fair as in those days when Solomon sang and called her _sweet_ and _beloved_ and _Sheba_. It is that unkind as well.

Yuuko doesn't enter that room if she can help it, and one of the worst fights she ever had with Clow happened when he decanted one of the (_too too many_) bottles of young laughter and poured it, like a libation, over the front stones of her garden gate.

_  
vi. Yours till hell freezes_

And it has been years and years since she tried to remember him (she does it out of habit now, instinctively, like smoking or drinking), but when the gates of her garden are flung open and a child staggers into her domain, Yuuko can _hear_, achingly, the future's next course (crazy little bitch, the future. She never did learn to slow down--). The world's gone wrong.

The boy is thin and pale and he has dark hair and startling eyes; he is maybe eleven. Yuuko looks down at him for one long moment before she _knows_ and then she is all swift movement, throwing herself at him, picking him up (_What have you done?_ She wants to cry) and carrying him indoors.

"Yuuko, Yuuko," Eriol Hiiragizawa cries plaintively—he is just a boy, such a little boy, and now he is being burdened by the memories of a dead and vastly unhappy man. "Yuuko, I have been split down the center, half of me is lost."

_  
vii. He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless_

Yuuko looked at Clow critically. "You look like a pirate," she told him at last, "wearing that stupid eye patch."

Clow rubbed his chin in a gesture that he hoped was thoughtful but that, unfortunately, made him look neurotic. "Pirates are clean-shaven, aren't they?" He asked, ignoring her scorn.

"Hello!" she poked his chin with a sharp fingernail, for emphasis. "Blue_beard_?"

_  
viii. The story of a flower that has made men mad_

She's not really addicted to opium (leastways, not the same way she is addicted to working spells in tandem); she smokes the stuff to calm herself, because there is no other way for her to sit back and wait for ever so many outcomes to hurry up and resolve themselves. Her visions are not as terrifying in their intensity as Clow's sometimes are, but that could be due to the drugs. She recalls her first trance sometimes, and the mere memory of it is enough to send her into a headlong panicky scramble for her pipe.

Working magic with Clow is entirely different: once the pentacles appear beneath her feet and her blood starts to sing with a thousand unknown verbs, Yuuko knows that her more sedate self is one of her great lies. This—the raw power of it, the exquisite commands that they murmur together—is heady and intimate. Yuuko is careless with her movements and quick with her mind, quicker with her clever tongue (Clow is more sedate in his pronunciations, surer, and he keeps his arms close to his body) and she doesn't mind the boneless, overused quality her body takes on as the spell weaves itself into being. It's better than sex, she's decided; more delirious than drugs, and far more intoxicating than those strange and poisonous alcohols she imbibes.

"This is my dragon to chase," she warns Clow when he tries to scold her after one particular spell, because he has no room to talk, not really (and it had been a beautiful thing, that magic: the backlash of power left her drenched with cold sweat, exhausted and gasping, trembling, her laugh a damaged kittenish creature).

Nearly all of her habits are unhealthy. She pretends that she stopped caring a long time ago.

----------------------

Notes (iv): Yes, Yuuko is referencing the Carthusian Order (I'll just bet that during one of their spats Clow spent a couple of decades praying the little hours in Grenoble). The Carthusian Order is the shit.

Notes (v): I know that Yuuko specifically states in volume one that she doesn't accept lives as payment, because the weight of murder is a heavy thing. However, she's a hell of a lot more sympathetic than a back-alley abortionist (although a part of me feels like she would hate this part of her job, because I get the sense that Yuuko can't have kids of her own, and she'd be the bestest most insane and unqualified parent in the history of ever) and the life of the foetus is not exactly part of the payment—or it is, but it's certainly not _her_ payment, it's just one of those overflowing consequences that the wisher has to deal with. Yuuko's job is, in this case, to act as a witness.

I just realized that depending on your position in the whole abortion debate, this note is way unnecessary. And whoa is this longer than most of my fics geez.

Notes (viii): "chasing the dragon" is a euphemism for drug use; specifically, smoking opiates. And PS, yes, I know Yuuko is extraordinarily powerful, but I kind of get the impression that she and Clow did a little marathon magic now and again. Yuuko's character seems to be inherently self-destructive, and I wonder how long she's been pretending that she can die.


	3. Strange her in a strange land

_ix. You're the swingingest thing_

Whenever they tried to dance with one another the movements were made a mockery, reduced as they were to stuttering, horribly graceless maneuverings. This was probably because she always insisted on leading and Yuuko wasn't very good at managing her skirts or traditional ballroom styles. (_Could you be anymore goddamn spastic?_ Clow snarled once after she had backed him into a low table and nearly dislocated his shoulder during an abortive spinning movement. Yuuko didn't dignify that with a response—giddily, in the back of her head, she couldn't seem to stop seeing what steps came next and confusing them with how she was supposed to be moving now.)

_  
x. Love, unconquered in the fight _

Men who are good husbands and fathers and who lay down their lives for their country make Yuuko feel depressed and satisfied in the same breath. She admires these beloved dead; she keeps books of their last words locked in an old desk drawer. (This is an inelegant gesture: a great many pages read only as choked cries, the names of wives, stunted prayers, the word 'mother.')

Clow tries to understand this yearning of Yuuko's, at least a little, for he spends long and complicated afternoons telling her about his mother. (She listens to him too, and she doesn't poke fun. Clow wonders if this preoccupation is a sign of just how inexperienced, how lonely she really is, despite her centuries spread out over the earth.)

_  
xi. In other tongues, despair_

They reign in their magic with a sort of hideous strength that compels others to wonder: how have they ever won a battle before in their lives?

_  
xii. O that thou would hidest me in the grave_

Or maybe it's really like this:

She has lived hundreds, maybe thousands of lives—because no matter where you go, what dimensions you retreat to, she is the only incarnation of herself.

It's a curious immortality, one that is not without it's own fair price: she dies every sixty years or so, because it's simple addition—all those little potential lives, making up her one own long one.

(She passes away in her sleep sometimes, and spends the night speaking with the dead. But of course it is not always this simple: she has been murdered at least fifteen times that Clow knows of. Each of these deaths is a little more violent and far worse to awaken from: for instance, once she spoke of the time she awoke and could not draw breath—someone was holding a pillow over her face and they wouldn't stop pushing down.)

_  
xiii. Ere the spider make a thin curtain for your epitaphs. _

She had plenty of regrets—heaping piles of them, she should have had many more neuroses that she did, actually—but she wasn't stupid enough to let them hinder her (at least, this is what she said aloud: sometimes she found herself pacing in the halls, cursing the fate of the Sibylline books). Clow, on the other hand, wrapped his many sorrows about him like a shroud and took to smiling sweetly and brokenly before he died.

That self-pity of his made her _furious_: but this was of course her way of hiding yet another hurt.

_  
xiv. That thing with feathers_

If Clow's wretched emotional retardation is enough to drive her mad, Yuuko knows that the dilemma that is Yue will send her spiraling so deeply into a berserk rage she will never quite climb out. Yue is (she fumes) the living _definition_ of angstbucket. His picture is probably nestled next to Kodansha's very own explanation, in big fat type: YUE, noun. ANGSTBUCKET. (See also: CLOW REED, _emotard_).

(She is really angrier with Clow for creating Yue with a heart like that. It's a great cruelty, to make a creature so haughty and lovely and crippled by servitude. Yue _loves _Clow, impossibly—it's so painfully obvious that even Cerberus cannot bring himself to tease Yue about it, and Yuuko doesn't dare say a word for fear of what else might tumble out of her prophetic lips.)

_  
xv. In the end it is not well_

Yuuko plays cat's-cradle with his secrets whenever Clow isn't looking, pulling them this way and that, thief-like. Some of them make dread crawl into her belly and smoulder deep within her, like adulterated embers. She doesn't weep at these unwarranted exhibits: she studies them, her eyes becoming carbon-and-topaz hard as she twists and pulls and needles and _insinuates_ things.

This snide habit irritates him, of course, although he will never say so to her face or within her hearing –that would satisfy her too much—because the whole routine of it is subtle and compelling and painful, like a canker sore blooming slowly on the tip of the tongue. Clow is a walking consequence and Yuuko doesn't so much take advantage of this as she reminds him, every waking moment in her presence (the sores are migrating to the lower line of his gums, the split in his lower lip: raw and sore and tasting irresistibly of metal, infection, and a winter full of sickness. He keeps shunting the feeling against his teeth, abrading the hurt until it swells into a magnificent whole) that there's a price to be paid for who and what he is: he doesn't have to like it, but she is his very own Charon and he's going to pay the toll she demands whether he likes it or not.

This is only fair.


End file.
